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The Search for Stability in an Unstable Economic Landscape

Bloomberg Beta Head Roy Bahat may spend his days “slinging money around,” as he phrases it, discovering and investing in hot new artificial intelligence (AI) startups, but he devotes much of his free time helping to imagine and plan for the future of work. These aren’t unrelated pursuits—Bahat says that AI gives him the feeling that the future is coming towards us more and more rapidly in a way he hasn’t experienced in other tech trends. Bahat defines AI as “a class of techniques that allow you to predict, using software,” and has strong convictions about the imminent ubiquity of AI. Very soon, anything that has a chip in it is going to have some ability to predict, says Bahat. He sees a false dichotomy in the argument about whether AI will augment humans or replace them. Anything that complements us replaces some things we do, Bahat argues.

Bahat spoke about his work with the Shift Commission and the various future of work scenarios the commission envisioned. We need to address the realities of our aging workforce and the fact that care work, including child and elder care, has historically been unpaid, and thus uncounted in economic terms, yet is vital for the functioning of our society. Bahat also corrected a number of misperceptions about economic trends. Bahat points out that the rate at which people move long distances is declining, the rate at which people switch jobs has stayed fairly constant, and the rate of new business creation is declining. Bahat noted that this is the first generation in the United States where children are statistically likely to earn less than their parents.

Given these trends, it’s no surprise that American workers are concerned about stability first and foremost. “”Unless you’re freed from fear, I don’t think the whole system works,” says Bahat. He takes issue with the social safety net metaphor, arguing that this concept implies people are starting from the same place—which is very clearly not the case. Bahat says he thinks it’s possible that universal basic income is the cheapest way to create a free society, and is in the camp that argues that UBI will not strip meaning from people’s lives, but rather give them more time and space to pursue it. He urges today’s workers to prepare themselves for a lifetime of entrepreneurship—not in the way the tech industry thinks of entrepreneurs, but in terms of becoming lifelong learners. Figuring out what to do with your life is a skill that can be practiced, Bahat says.